Comment by whstl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whstl | Hacker News Reader

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React is very similar to PHP in this regard. PHP has (had?) several major design flaws, and yet it became the default for people with less experience.

I don't think that React is as problematic as PHP ever was, and also frameworks like Laravel have improved the PHP experience tremendously, so there is now a way for less experienced people to use it.

IMO: the problem here is pretending that everyone has an innate right to use React right when it's clearly a library that works better when people have a bit more experience than the average web dev.

We as an industry tell people "don't do your own crypto, it's hard to get it right". We don't blame crypto for being hard, or demand new frameworks. Same for things like assembly, C++, Rust, formal proofs, writing an OS, operating BGP infrastructure, etc.

But with React it has to be "kid gloves on", otherwise it's shit?

This is perhaps a bigger problem in our industry: lack of experience is not seem as an individual problem, and we blame-shift, blame marketing, blame Facebook, Dan Abramov, trends...

Perhaps we should be saying "React is not for beginners", same as "don't do crypto".

Web dev is special. The industry has spent the last 20 years sacrificing almost everything to make building web sites more beginner friendly. There is an expectation that the "full-stack" (everything between node and react) should be effortless, that is absent from other fields. "one click to deploy" in not a thing in crypto, in embedded or in kernel dev, for instance; whereas it's expected that a junior web dev is productive from day one. That's just normal industrialization, specializing jobs and then making them simpler, starting where the numbers are larger.

Ironically, piling up simplistic technologies have created quite complex houses of cards in places. HTTP itself being the most obvious example of a tech meant to be simple and quick to grasp that morphed into a super complex, ineficient and insecure gremlin of which nobody who is not a specialist (or an AI) has a full picture anymore.

Nobody I ever worked with ever said anything even remotely close to that first paragraph.

"Full stack should be effortless"? What? This is definitely not coming from anyone other than two groups: random HN people with an axe to grind, or people trying to diminish the value of the profession.

Hiring for web is difficult, salaries are historically good, people complain about complexities, including yourself: "quite complex", "super complex", "nobody has a full picture".

Nevertheless: React proves that it's not effortless. There are complexities in there and kicking and screaming saying "it was supposed to be easy!!!" won't change the situation.

"It should be simple" yeah Crypto should be simple as well, so there are no bugs. But it's not.

Maybe learn to value other people's jobs.

> Nobody I ever worked with ever said anything even remotely close to that first paragraph.

No, they’re correct. Many people in the web dev community spent a couple of decades there obsessed with being beginner friendly. For example, “Anyone can learn to code”. We pushed back against anything perceived as gate keeping. There was general assembly and other coding bootcamps, to teach beginners web dev. And a million beginner videos. Web dev events at the time were full of beginners. I remember a show of hands once at SydJS. 70% of people in the room had been programming for a year or less. I stopped going, because speakers started catering to the audience.

Other areas of programming aren’t like this. Nobody runs 12 week coding bootcamps to teach complete beginners to build operating systems. It’s accepted you shouldn’t roll your own crypto. And we tell beginners to use Postgres, not roll their own database.

I’m not saying it’s a good or a bad thing. But it was definitely a thing.

Bootcamps teachers, company owners, HN posters and anyone with an interest in keeping the salary low will have this opinion for sure.

This still doesn't mean the web programming owes anything to those people.

Did anyone say they do?

Whoever said all tech must be foolproof.

My management didn’t say it explicitly, but did so through their actions.

A self-service portal was created internally. Every infrastructure team was expected to make services available via this new portal. Timelines were tight, primary jobs were still expected to be done, and the chief architect on the project said creating the API only takes 10 minutes.

To onboard and use this self-service portal, these teams (many of which who didn’t have a single developer, but rather sys admins) were expected to leverage Flask, React, an internal component library (3 conflicting ones with poor documentation which tweaked inputs from 3rd party components and required spelunking into the code to find how to use them), and very strict rules around the Flask API… all in managed repos that required approvals for PRs from a non-responsive team.

This was supposed to be a little week-long side project for a bunch of non-developers, with no training, insufficient documentation, and little support by the person who built the portal.

Needless to say, the project is now dead, but it took about 3 years. During those 3 years, the ideas that “full-stack should be effortless” was the prevailing view, and that anyone off the street should be able to effortlessly plug into the framework that was created.

>not a thing in crypto

People are deploying meme coins to blockchains with a single X post to a bot. The pump.fun era made it really easy for anyone to launch a meme coin.

I think the GP comment was talking about cryptography, not cryptocurrencies.

What does one click to deploy mean for cryptography?

It’s “not a thing”:

> "one click to deploy" in not a thing in crypto

Because deploy is not what people do with cryptography code.

Yes, that's why it's not a thing.

That's a vacuous statement. I can similarly say one click deploy is not a thing for hamburgers either.

You could, but you would be 100% right.

Therefore useless discussion.

My point exactly.

My point is you replying is useless, therefore stop, and I shall do the same.

> We don't blame crypto for being hard, or demand new frameworks

This is not true. There are innumerable cryptography libraries whose primary reason for existence was to replace or offer an alternative to a library with the same affordances but with primitives that were too easy to use incorrectly. “Maybe we should redesign this knife so it’s hard to slice a finger off” is not unique to web dev

I'm clearly not talking about libraries, but rather about the assertion "don't do your own crypto".

If you want frontend to be effortless, there's already Wix and Webflow.

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